July 2 is a momentous day in history, when it comes to phenomena so perversely puzzling that they would make Charles Fort, that late 19th-early 20th century chronicler of the inexplicable, jump for joy. On this day in 1843, for example, an alligator reportedly fell from the sky during a thunderstorm in South Carolina. 116 years later, in 1959, low-budget director Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space, widely regarded as the worst sci-fi movie ever made, premiered. Precisely 23 years later, in 1982, a man named Larry Walters attached balloons to a lawn chair and ascended to 16,000 feet in altitude over San Pedro, California. It could be that in one of the unobservable additional dimensions to reality posited in string theory, all of these events share some common, perfectly logical explanation — one, say, that also makes sense of some the stories in today’s round-up. Or not.